HAPPY NEW YEAR!!!! Alright, since that is over with we can move on….Since 2016 has now come and gone, I must (yes must), once again, give out the complete list of movies that I saw from the past year and rank them from worst to first. I’ve seen 127 of the movies that were released in 2015 as I write this (I’ma pat myself on the back because that is a career high for me…and then realize that I don’t have a life) so I will post the list in pieces over the next several, SEVERAL days. Below you’ll see #127 – #121 a.k.a. THE BOTTOM SEVEN MOVIES OF 2016.

127. The Darkness

This is one of those movies that you know is wack when you’re watching it but you don’t realize how wack it is until after you leave the theater and you think back to yourself what exactly you thought about it. When I tried to think about this movie and what I actually liked about it, I couldn’t come up with anything. I’m not saying it’s the worse movie I’ve ever seen but it just didn’t do anything good. The plot was uninteresting, the movie didn’t do a OK job at trying to scare you (it almost seemed like it didn’t really try at all to try to scare you which is pretty sad since it’s supposed to be a “scary” movie), the cast was weak (especially Lucy Fry as the annoying, something is off upstairs daughter Stephanie), the ending was weak and the dumb side stories for the characters didn’t do anything for the plot besides increase the runtime. So yes, why did we need to know about Peter (Kevin Bacon) having infidelity issues or Stephanie throwing up to get skinny when it did nothing for the story?

126. The Forest

Here’s another failed attempt at a scary movie and it kind of sucks because I’m a fan of Natalie Dormer. But I already figured that this movie wouldn’t give her anything to work with, though it’s not like she really helped matters herself by what she did in the movie but whatever. The movie just sucked at being scary with everything from the demons to the scare moments being poorly done and the evil looking people in the forest looking too over the top to even begin to be scary. The setting of the movie didn’t help things either because when the movie was taking place in the forest, it was daytime a lot of the time and we all know the night is when things get the scariest, duh. The movie did have the capabilities of being decent if it would have played with the whole element of the forest messing with your psyche more. When that part of the movie finally got interesting, the movie was ending so it’s like the film didn’t know it’s go-to play until the game was over. Oh well.

125. Ben-Hur

Once again this movie showed that these old-time period, usually dealing with religion, sandal wearing movies aren’t my thing. If that wasn’t the type of movie this was, I still wouldn’t have liked it because it was straight-up boring. The religious aspect didn’t draw me in so I had to wait about an hour for something good to happen and I wouldn’t even really call it good. The slave ship wreck scene was appealing because it brought some action to the fray. But things quickly got back to be boring after that. Nothing stopped your eye lids from shutting until the chariot race at the end. This movie was just boring boring boring. The director, Timur Bekmambetov, tricked me when he made ‘Wanted’ because I thought he was a good filmmaker. Ever since then, he’s been trying to prove me wrong and I concede Timur, you got me.

This movie was doomed before the finishing touches were being done to it in the editing room. My girl Natalie Portman had the likes of Michael Fassbender and Bradley Cooper about to star alongside her in the movie at one point but things just didn’t go her way. Plus, more people dropping out on top of other unforeseen events, things weren’t looking good for the movie and the end product proved that. Although Portman was good as the sort-of ruthless Jane (who has a gun if you didn’t know), the movie was hindered by it being very slow. When it wasn’t slow, the action wasn’t nothing to write home about…or even bring up when having an in-depth conversation about this movie. The dialogue and the progression of the story wasn’t even that interesting when things started to get active. The basis of the movie did seem to have potential but clearly it wasn’t able to reach anywhere near it.

121. The Neon Demon

Nicolas Winding Refn is very close to becoming a M. Night Shyamalan type in my eyes because the two movies he’s directed since ‘Drive’ have been completely crap. This latest one shows his artsy styling of directing mixed with a score that sounds similar to those in his previous couple movies along with having a story that is going to take some thinking to eventually understand. Sometimes I like movies that make you think but this is not one of them. I don’t care what this movie was ultimately trying to tell me, it was still wack. The majority of the movie moved at an extremely slow pace, even though the score would make you think otherwise, and didn’t show anything interesting or worth mentioning until the 3rd act. I use the word “interesting” just because weird things started to happen so since I was confused by it all, my interest levels peaked at this time. But whatever because everything up until that point was just boring and subpar. The movie did include a Keanu Reeves I’m not used to seeing which was a positive but to counteract that, it gave us very little of Christina Hendricks which was a negative. Also, a lesbian living person on corpse sex scene? Yeah, this movie had that and yes it was as odd, weird and as gross as it sounds.